


Six Bullets

by BlackjackKent



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, Old West
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-21 16:52:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/902623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackjackKent/pseuds/BlackjackKent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When an old bandit with revenge on his mind rides into the mining-town-turned-thieve's-den of Omega, the town's bartender and defacto leader brings her resources to bear to help him.</p><p>[[Alternate Universe (Old West) fic featuring Aria T'Loak and Zaeed Massani. See first chapter notes for background. Currently rated for General Audiences; may be updated to a higher rating depending on how potential romance scenes go.]]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Hey and thanks for reading!
> 
> Those of you who follow my Tumblr roleplay blog(s) know that I have, quite by accident, fallen heavily into shipping Aria/Zaeed -- mostly the fault of fellow Tumblr user shotofrage, who I have played my Aria (alpha-of-omega) against to great success thus far and general enthusiasm from our readership. (Basically Zaaria is the best ship and if you have not yet seen the light you are in fact missing out in a big way. :D )
> 
> Thus it was that I received a "three-sentence AU pairing drabble" prompt as follows: "Aria/Zaeed | Afterlife is an old western saloon and Aria is its benefactor and Zaeed is an old bandit makin' trouble where he shouldn't."
> 
> I hope it is obvious to everyone how completely PERFECT this AU is for the two of them even if you do NOT ship them. And I couldn't resist trying to make a larger fic out of it. So here it is!
> 
> This is my first attempt at a non-canon-universe AU so any and all constructive criticism is certainly appreciated. I hope you all enjoy!
> 
> [[The usual disclaimers -- characters are not my property and belong to Bioware. I only claim my interpretation of them. I also do not claim exact accuracy in my old west depictions; my level of scholarship on the subject consists of having seen both versions of True Grit. :P ]]

Omega was not a town people wandered into lightly. It had been a mining town initially -- parked on a gold vein in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico -- but the gold had run out and with it had gone the respectable elements of its populace. In the end it had become a matter of common humor that the mountains it sat in were named for the “Blood of Christ,” because it had become a haven for the godless, the lawless, and the perverse, a good bit larger and more successful than it had ever been when the god-fearing miners owned it.

It had no sheriff -- such a man would have blown his own brains out by the end of his first week, overwhelmed by the amount of crime that simply happened as if it were a matter of course, in daylight as well as night. It had no pastor; there was a mad preaching hermit who lived in one of the abandoned farmhouses a little down the canyon but people listened to him more for entertainment than out of any desire to be saved.

In truth, Omega had no real leader at all -- except Aria.

Aria was, at first glance, merely a bartender, a storekeeper with a hooded gaze and cold eyes, but was in fact the strangest thing amid a town full of things most people would call unusual. She was a woman, for one thing, though she never wore a dress, sticking instead to an outfit one would have expected on a cowboy twice her age -- leather vest, open-collared shirt, boots, trousers, and a shoulder belt on the back of which hung a sawed-off shotgun to go with the heavy revolver (always loaded) on her hip.

No one knew quite where she’d come from originally, or how she’d stumbled into the town-turned-den-of-thieves, but the general rumor among the older settlers went that she had been a cowhand out of California initially, a scrawny orphan runt with a knack for shooting. She’d followed one of the men from her ranch, bouncing along on the back of the saddle, when he decided to leave the cattle life and try to strike it rich; he’d ended up dead of some sort of unpleasant twitching disease halfway through the journey and she’d ridden in by herself on his horse and taken up residence in one of the rooms over the Afterlife Saloon.

Interestingly, the proprietor of the Afterlife Saloon had also ended up dead shortly thereafter and everyone had woken up to find Aria serving drinks, with a practiced hand and an easy, cool smirk, from behind the bar. Sometime between then and now she seemed to have gotten her fingers into just about everything that went on in that town, and if asked, most of the populace would be hard put to say exactly when the change had occurred.

But in almost every sense of the world, Omega had become Aria’s. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say Aria had become Omega.

She was beautiful, too -- stunningly so, with a deep tanned complexion, blue eyes that seemed ageless, dark hair that framed her face in gentle waves, and hips that drew the eye from across a room. And yet no one in the town would have dared to make a move on her, except the occasional newcomer; every once in a while she had to break a nose or an arm to make her point. No one troubled Aria without getting trouble in return. 

Most of that trouble she dispensed herself, somewhat gleefully, but when she could not be bothered, she had a small posse at her disposal who had enough firepower between them to render a largeish horse into its component limbs without the help of an axe. She ruled over them with an iron fist and let them do the rest, when necessary.

But none of them, even, really _knew_ her. She called none of them friend. She called no one friend, indeed, except herself. And she liked it that way. She had her world in order and intended to keep it so.

Zaeed Massani sort of threw a wrench in all that, though, when he rode into town.


	2. Massani

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zaeed Massani comes to Omega with a bullet in his back and a request for help.

Aria knew who Massani was by the time he really turned her life upside down, of course. He was something of a jack-of-all-trades in the questionable-legality world she inhabited. Bandit, killer-for-hire, farmhand, cattle rancher, cattle rustler, horsebreaker, horse thief -- he would do whatever someone would pay him for, and when he had the money to burn, he always brought it back with him to Omega.

She knew why he always came back, and it wasn’t the quality of her liquor -- though of course that was always excellent. He was quiet about it to most people, but she knew perfectly well he’d lost his heart to her for years, as long as she’d been a staple in the town. She’d made good use of the fact; he could always be counted on to take care of her more difficult detractors, and at half his usual price for such things. In return, she primarily teased and toyed with his interest, but she did also offer him protection from the more legitimate lawmen whose attention he managed to attract.

He was enough of a regular that he had his own room, a small closet of a place over Afterlife, looking down the rocky cliff face on which the town’s western edge was perched. It was something of a ritual between them, whenever he arrived up the dirt road; he’d have a shot of whiskey and give her a grin, ask her if she felt like joining him upstairs. She’d say no, laugh it off as she always did, and then they’d move on to business.

But this time...was different.

He’d arrived in the middle of the night, for one thing. Aria had been woken by a thudding noise and one of the hulking men she employed for a night guard on the bar shouting something muffled from outside; she’d emerged to find the guard, Bray Walker, in a tense standoff with Massani, who was standing unsteadily with a gun in each hand, two to Bray’s one.

“Aria...” he’d mumbled, turning towards her, his one good eye widening with an attempt at a smile. “They won’ let me in...” And then he’d collapsed, dribbling a small rivulet of blood out onto Afterlife’s porch.

Bray had not, she finally determined, been the one to shoot him. Massani had arrived that way, staggering from bloodloss and leading his lamed horse, and made straight for the closed bar in a sort of delirious haze. When they dragged him up to his room and rousted Doc Solus out of his house to look at him, the doctor had pointed out, in his usual blunt manner, that a few more hours might have meant the end of Zaeed Massani permanently.

But Massani was a stubborn son of a bitch. He’d pulled through, powered by pure rage at what had happened to him, and perhaps by the unconscious sense of her waiting by his bedside.

Love, after all, can be a hell of an anesthetic.

* * *

He was as surly and profane as ever when he woke up. “Goddamn it, where the hell am I?” were the highly characteristic first words out of his mouth, slurred with dissipating unconsciousness. “And where’s my goddamn gun?”

Aria smiled faintly. The gun in question was no working weapon, but a broken, dust-clogged old repeater rifle he’d nicknamed “Jessie." In its time, Jessie had been as temperamental and deadly as he was himself, though it had long since ceased to function. These days he treated it like a talisman, and, with a lonely and quietly heartsick man's instinctual need to care for _something_ , he treated it like a pet, like an old friend, and went nowhere without it.

At the moment, Jessie sat in the corner, leaned up against the windowsill. Aria pointed it out to him with a gesture, and he grunted. “Good. Wasn’t sure she’d make it up the canyon with me. That goddamn horse was so lame I wasn’t sure he’d carry us both, so she rode and I walked.” He caught her bemused look and smiled weakly. “Joking, love. Horse wouldn’t have carried me anyway. Rifle or no rifle. Goddamn, my back hurts.”

“You were shot in it,” she returned easily, raising one eyebrow at him.

“Ever the literalist,” he answered irritably, shaking his head. “Maybe try a little sympathy?”

She just chuckled, leaning forward to look him full in the face and get a sense of his condition. In the full light of day and without the ghastly paleness of bloodloss about him, he looked much as he always had. She’d always reflected that, though he had the temperament of one of those irascible men who seemed to have been born old, the chiseled set of his jaw suggested he had been quite handsome once. Those looks had faded, however, replaced with a myriad of scars and crags, evidence of a hundred gun- and knife-fights, irritable steers, wild broncos, and other assorted dangers of the western frontier.

“Every bit of it made me tougher,” he liked to say, when regaling her customers with stories in one corner or another of the dingy parlor downstairs. “Except this one...” and he’d raise his shirt, indicating a wide welted scar along his lower back. “That ‘un was when I was sixteen. Was a dumb rock of a kid and fell into a cactus. Didn’t make me tougher. But it sure as goddamn hell made me give cactuses a wide berth.”

The most striking thing about him -- and the one that made even many of the more lawless among Omega’s population give _him_ a wide berth -- was his eyes. Or his _eye_ , rather, for he only had one good one, a green piercing circle set deep in his face. The other was a glassy grey-white, blind as a dead man’s, and surrounded by a wide circular scar and swollen skin that looked like a perpetual angry burn. No one had ever asked him how he lost it. Even Aria did not know all the facts, though by now she knew him well enough that his off-kilter gaze could not unsettle her.

“I think you’ll be all right,” she commented, watching him struggle stubbornly (and unsuccessfully) to reach a sitting-up position.

"Were you worried?" he asked her gruffly, slumping back against the pillows. "Sweet of you."

"Hardly," she answered casually. "I knew you were too stubborn to die."

"Course I am." He smirked. "Takes more'n one bullet to kill Zaeed Massani."

"It only ever takes one bullet, Massani," she answered gravely. "It just wasn't this one. Are you going to tell me what happened?"

The abrupt change of subject made him blink. “ ‘Course I am,” he answered gruffly. “Why d’you think I staggered all this way here?”

“Doctor Solus’s tender ministrations?”

He barked a laugh. “That man may be a doctor but he’s got all the warmth of a coyote. Could’ve gotten treated in Alamosa if it was just a doctor I was after.”

“What, then? We do have the best liquor in the county,” Aria countered dryly.

“You know damn well I came to see you,” he snapped, then winced as the effort pulled at the wound in his back.

“Oh, of course,” she answered, her innocent expression belied by the sparks of sharp amusement in her eyes.

He scowled and gave up on trying to sit straight, letting himself slide back down with his head on the pillow. “Goddamn impossible, you are.” When she didn’t respond, he folded his arms across his chest and went on, “Anyway, I also need your help.”

Now they were getting to the meat of it. Aria kept her face still, but she leaned forward slightly in her chair, looking at him attentively.

His good eye narrowed with sudden tension and his lips drew tight in a hard smile. “I need to kill Vido Santiago.”


End file.
